"Lane County has an abundance of prehistoric artifacts. This example of pictographs have defied the elements for centuries. Writings can be see along Highway 395 near Lake Abert. County contains almost a fourth of the state’s Indian writings.”
— 1959: Caption of a featured photograph of a petroglyph boulder, Sunday Oregonian. [1]
“Indian Pictographs in Lake County. Such Indian picture writings are usually not very old, because the desert wind and sand tend to obliterate them in about two hundred years as a rule.”
— 1964: Caption of a photograph of a petroglyph boulder published as the full-page frontispiece of The Oregon Desert (1964) [2] (Image above, adapted)
“The boulder was blasted by a maintenance crew about 1967, and the fragments graded into the ditch on the west side of the highway.”
— 1967: Noted by Malcolm and Louise Loring (1982) [3]
The identical petroglyph boulder is imaged and imagined in all three publications; The Oregonian and Oregon Desert photographs are almost identical.
Drawing adapted from the Lorings's sketch of the boulder’s face prior to the 1967 blasting, noting: "On one large lizard petroglyph the rock surface in the body was polished and painted with red pigment." [3]
Hwy 395 and Abert Rim these days: Lizard Boulder disappeared
Lone-Lizard sees it coming: Ancient-History in not ancient. Lone-Lizard sees it going: Ancient-History is not history as a rule. Ancient-History sees Lone-Lizard not as Lizard, sees as dreamtime highway lake-shore fragmentings.
From slope above Hwy 396, view west over Lake Abert toward Winter Rim; rock wall an "historic" cattle fence.
NOTES
[1] "Pictographs, Petroglyphs Premium Lake County Attractions,” Sunday Oregonian, August 23, 1959, by Paul Laartz, The highlight of this feature story was a photograph of the boulder with petroglyphs on the southeast shore of Lake Abert. The story was part of series in partnership with the Oregon State Motor Assn to promote tourism during Oregon’s centennial year —1959.
Eerily, this 1959 article also included a second photograph: “Lakeview, well known as a center of lumbering, cattle raising, has recently added this uranium reduction mill to its list of contributors to a thriving Lake County economy.”
With tabloid-ready names, Lucky Lass and White King, two 1950s uranium mines a few miles NW of Lakeview on Fremont Forest lands, were later designated Superfund sites. The “disposal” and “processing” sites were near town: Lakeview Uranium Mill operated 1958-1961. A 2017 fact-sheet: “The Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act of 1978. Title I processing site and disposal site near Lakeview, Oregon. This site is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management.”
Legacy? Ask Lizard…
[2] The Oregon Desert, 1964, by E R Jackman and Reub A. Long, Caxton Press (Idaho). Chapter 11, titled “Indians in the Desert,” offers folksy observation, opinion and hearsay, vague (mis)information, and condescending pronouncements typical of late 19th- and early 20th-century attitudes. This enduringly popular volume has been continuously in-print since 1964; distributed by University of Nebraska Press. The full-page frontispiece photograph is the petroglyph boulder destroyed in 1967.
[3] Malcolm and Louise Loring in 1967 visited the Lake Abert shore location of petroglyph boulder highlighted in the two photographs. In the description for Site 140 the Lorings reference the 1959 Oregonian story. Loring, J. Malcolm, and Louise Loring. Pictographs & Petroglyphs of the Oregon Country, Parts I & II. (1982, corrected 1996)
[4] Dreamtime Highway: not a completely original phrase. In Dreamtime Superhighway (2008), a superb book about the rock art of New South Wales, Australia, Jo McDonald proposes, “the rock art in the Sydney region functioned as a prehistoric information superhighway.” ... Something to ponder as one traverses the (now desiccating) Lake Abert eastern shoreline along the snaking US Highway 395.
[5] MORE?! 2022: “Oregon’s Lake Abert is ‘in deep trouble.’ The state shut down its effort to figure out why” by Rob Davis, The Oregonian, Jan 16, 2022
Ever the... 2021: US Senators Merkley and Romney introduced legislation to protect long-term health of saline ecosystems. (Status unknown April 2022)
Abert Lake looking south -- 2016 a year with water!
Photos and Conjurings Douglas Beauchamp
What is this life if, full of care,
we have no time to stand and stare?
— W.H. Davies (English poet, 1871-1940)
On a plaque on his Cotswolds stone house
